Photo Mode: Aerials & Camera

Photo Mode is a camera window for screenshots and videos: it finds the shot, frames it like a photographer, flies drone tours over your map, looks through lenses from 12 to 400 mm, paints the light and weather, brings in wildlife and saves the picture at up to four times your screen resolution.

Open it with the camera button in the top-left button bar, next to the data layers button. Opening the window changes nothing; your own settings, light and weather come back when you are done.

Transport Fever 3 gives mods only a few camera and graphics controls, so Photo Mode works with what the game has. A mod can't steer the free camera or smooth the camera's movement, so the tours and camera moves drive the normal camera, and the long-lens shots play through the game's own cutscene camera. There is no color grading or depth of field, so every look is built from the game's own sky, haze and water settings, over 1,000 combinations prepared in advance. Some graphics settings can't be changed while playing without crashing the game, so High graphics mode raises only the safe ones.

Aerials

• A slow, continuous drone flight across your map, over towns, landscape, water, rivers, rail lines and points of interest, a new area every flight leg (30 seconds to 5 minutes), or along your saved views, from one to the next in the order you set.
• Look down, at the horizon or from high up. Turn, tilt or zoom the camera during the flight to look around.

Tour

• Pick the style: Wander drifts around each place without cuts, Shots glide from place to place and hold each one.
• Pick where: interesting places across your map (bridges, skylines, viewpoints, stations, towns and more), your saved views in the order you set, or here, the place you are looking at. Across the map or over your saved views, Wander stays at each place for 30 seconds to 5 minutes, then glides on to the next.
• How long to hold, the angle and distance ranges, an optional Ken Burns drift, and drone flights between shots.
• Saved views: save up to 50 camera views per savegame to choose the places the aerials and the tour visit. Rename, reorder, delete them, or jump to one.
• Labels can hide during tours, and the game can pause while the tour runs.

Subjects

• Random subject: jump to anything on your map, a random place, or a random vehicle, train, road vehicle, aircraft, ship, person, station, town or industry, framed from a good distance and a fresh angle each time. Vehicles and people are followed at once.
• Interesting shots, framed the way a photographer would: a train on a bridge, crossing water, trains passing, a tunnel portal, a landing or take-off, the busiest street, the skyline, a viewpoint over a town, a train at a platform, and the oldest, fastest and longest vehicles. Click again for another one.

Animals

• Add the game's own animals right where you look: herds of deer or horses, a wolf pack, bears, a lone cougar, flocks of cranes or gulls, circling eagles, schools of salmon or discus. Your map's own animals come first.
• Pick the distance (close, middle, far), the formation (a group, a line across, single file, spread out) and which way they face (any way, to the camera, side-on, away). They are placed on the ground you can see, at a size that shows in the picture.
• A list counts what you added, with Remove per kind and Remove all.

Camera

• Shots around the middle of the view: Eye level, Low angle, Drone, Bird's eye, Horizon and High horizon. Switching between them comes back to the same place until you move the camera.
• Camera moves: Orbit circles the middle of the view or your subject, Wander drifts slowly around it, Follow keeps a vehicle or person in view, Cockpit rides along.
• Lens view: see your view through another lens, Ultra wide (12 mm), Wide (18 mm), Normal (50 mm), Telephoto (135 mm) or Super telephoto (400 mm). The lens frames the object nearest the middle of the view: long lenses step back so hills, towns and sky stack up behind it, wide ones come close. Hold or Orbit; ride along with a vehicle or stand steady beside its route; keep your game speed, pause the world or run it at normal speed.
• Lens tour: a new subject every 5, 10 or 20 seconds, each through a lens from the set you pick (all, long or wide).

Light

• Presets for golden hour, blue hour, noon and night; time-lapses for sunrise, sunset and a running clock.
• Winter, spring or summer sun, and front light, side light or backlight worked out from where the camera looks.
• Sliders for the time of day, the date and the sun's direction, with step buttons for fine changes. Freeze time holds everything still.

Weather

• Over 1,000 looks: mix a sky, a haze and a water look, built from your map's own climate. Skies such as Soft light, Dramatic, Storybook, Moonlit night, Golden glow, Cold blue, Faded film, Neon dusk and Legacy; hazes such as Crisp & clear, Hazy morning, Misty valley, Soft background and Dust storm; water such as Mirror water, Crystal clear, Wild water and Tropical turquoise. The arrows beside each list step through them.
• Presets for clear, overcast and storm; weather over time (Storm rolls in, Clearing, Low clouds); sliders for the clouds, the cloud height and the cloud density.
• Foreground: a low cloud veil at the camera's height, and rain around the camera.

Settings

• Saved setups: save the whole picture (looks, time, date, sun, clouds, Freeze time, High graphics mode and hidden labels) under a name and load it again later, up to 30 per savegame. Restore last setup brings the picture back after an accidental Esc.
• High graphics mode: textures, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, reflections, geometry, terrain, grass and resolution scale at their highest, for screenshots. It stays on when you close the window (the camera button shows a green outline).
• Hide labels: hides the names, rates and icons over towns, stations, industries and vehicles for a clean picture.

Taking the picture

• 1x, 2x, 4x: the buttons at the bottom of the window save the view at your screen's size or at twice or four times its width and height, without the interface, in the game's screenshots folder.
• Free camera: the game's own free camera without the interface. Esc comes back.
• During a lens view, small buttons at the top right take a 1x, 2x or 4x screenshot or stop it, and the game's screenshot key (F9 unless you changed it) works too.

Mod settings

• Debug: performance log (default Off): writes timing lines to the game's log file. Only for tracking down slowdowns.

Notes

• Shadows can't be changed while playing (it crashes the game): set them in the game's Settings menu (Graphics). High graphics mode leaves them as they are.
• Switching High graphics mode on or off stalls the game for about a second while the textures reload. Expect a lower frame rate while it is on. Your settings come back when you untick it or open the menu, and after a crash, the next game you load puts them back.
• A 4x screenshot is a large file and the game freezes for 10 seconds or more while it saves; the window says so first.
• The game draws everything sharp: a long lens brings the background closer but there is no depth-of-field blur.
• Animals put where they can't live (steep ground, near roads, buildings or water) die within seconds and the game removes them; horses and birds live anywhere. Added animals are the game's own animals and are saved with your game like any other; Remove all takes them away again.
• Looks, light and weather change only the picture: the menu puts your own back, and they are never saved. A savegame stores only your saved views, your saved setups and the last setup. Safe to add to or remove from existing saves; if you remove the mod from a save made while the light was set, set the day and weather cycles back in the calendar's weather and time panel.
• Mods that change the atmosphere, such as Realistic Environment Pro, write the same light and cloud values while Photo Mode's light and weather override is on: use one at a time for the light.

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Changelog

Revision 2 (2026-10-19)

• New: Aerials and Tour are the first two tabs. Each can go across your whole map or along the saved views you pick, in your order.
• New: Aerials can fly along your saved views, from one to the next.
• New: Wander tours roam across the map or over your saved views. They drift around each interesting place for 30 seconds to 5 minutes, then glide on to the next. Wander is the default tour style.
• Changed: the Tour tab picks a style (Wander or Shots) and where to go, instead of the Mode list. Mixed is now "Drone flight between shots".
• Changed: the saved views moved into the Aerials and Tour tabs; the Views tab is gone.
• Changed: saved setups are stored in the savegame instead of the game settings, so each game keeps its own. Setups saved with revision 1 don't carry over.
• Fixed for PlayStation 5: the window no longer risks crashing the UI where the console's game lacks parts the PC version has.

Revision 1 (2026-10-14)

• New: first release.